Swordigo: A Forgotten Classic

Revisiting Swordigo: A Forgotten Mobile Classic.

We all remember playing angry birds, subway surfers, and temple run as kids. Fun times. A game that I also remember playing and being plenty fun was Swordigo. It was a classic side scroller action-adventure game released by Touch Foo in 2012. It is similar to games like Zelda Ⅱ- Adventure of Link and Castle Vania they are also some of the most popular side scroller games. It felt like a mobile version of Zelda Ⅱ. Although it was not as popular as the classics like angry birds or subway surfers with only 10 million downloads compared to the billion downloads both angry birds and subways surfers have, it still had a fanbase who loved the game and had fun playing it. I wanted to revisit this game see how it would hold up compared to newer games.

In Swordigo you follow an unnamed hero from Crain wood village trying to save the world from the corruptors. Your objective is to find the ancient mage blade and use it to defeat the corruptors. That is, it. There isn’t much of a story in this game. The story isn’t complex, but it is good for a pickup and play mobile game. In this game you get experience points by killing enemies which can help you level up your stats like health, attack damage and magic ability. There is a healer and shop available at every prominent town in this game. If you get injured, you can go to the healer and get healed back to full health for zero cost. The shops include items like swords, armors, potions and trinkets. You can buy these items from the coins you collected from killing creatures and cutting grass for some reason. Trinkets can be really helpful as they can help add special effects to your equipment and abilities like more damage, regeneration, freezes and much more. You will also find portals throughout the world which can enable you to quickly transport to another portal which you have unlocked. They are really useful and can save a lot of time. Throughout the game you also acquire more spells which each have their own unique purposes.

Playing this game even after such a long time feels really good because of how simple the controls of this game are. You have 2 buttons to move forwards and backwards, one to jump and one to attack, That’s it. Nowadays mobile games have become so complex that they just fill half the screen with controls. It honestly ruins the experience of playing on a phone. The world of Swordigo was surprisingly fun to explore again. Traveling from one region to another region with completely new enemies and bosses helps keep the game fresh. It changes the setting enough to make the region unique adding its own little quirks. Each major region has a boss battle that you have to do to get a shard for the mage blade. They were not the hardest but were challenging enough. Some bosses require certain spells like for the boss in the fiery depth of the caves you need the hook to pull the boss down, so you damage it and the dimension rift spell in the icy caves to break its armor. Overall, the bosses were fun to clear. My favorite region was definitely the corrupted groves; it had a really creepy vibe to it. You also fight the final boss here. It was a little hard but there are other ways to easily clear the boss battle. The game also did not take too long to beat. It may take a few hours considering your pace but is really worth the time spent.

So, what do I think about this game? I think that it is still the great adventure game that i remember from my childhood. It still holds up considering the trash that is put out on mobile devices nowadays this is far better than those games. They also made a game which sort of had references to Swordigo called Grim valor maybe we can talk about in the future. Hope I did not spoil the game for the people who haven’t played it yet. That is, it for today and have a wonderful day.